That was Then, This is Now (and then there’s chip music)

Sometimes I can lose the belief in why chipmusic is still (or, especially) today - artistically and politically - important to present as something other than videogame romantics. I came across something today that hit the spot. It was written by Laurie Spiegel, who was making chipmusic already in the 1960s. In 1995 she wrote That was Then <=> This is Now where she compares the contemporary computer music environment with the one two decades earlier. Here is an excerpt from the text. (sorry about the length of it but I didn’t want to cut it shorter)

Commonly Assumed Then:

• Diversity and individuality are essential to the methods as well as the results of artistic processes.
• These technologies consist of hand-created tools bearing the creative stamps of their makers’ individual personalities, identities, values, methods, and goals.
• It’s amazing that we’ve been able to get computers to do this and how rapidly the technology is evolving.
• Tools, techniques, and information for doing music with computers should be available to everyone who wants to try.
• Figuring out how my computer can do music, technically, is how I can do music the way I want to.

Commonly Postulated Now:

• Whatever can be standardized should be, if consensus can be attained, because standardization simplifies manufacture and use and lowers cost.
• Tools should be impersonal and devoid of aesthetic bias. [...]
• It’s amazing how long it’s taking these companies to bring out the features we want and how slow progress is.
• Tools, techniques, and information for doing music with computers are proprietary intellectual property that should not be divulged and can only be used by paying for them or other special arrangement.
• Figuring out how computers can do music, technically, is too complicated. Fortunately, I don’t have to because its someone else’s job. [...]

Spiegel herself expands on mainly the artistic consequences of this. There is a lot to comment about these things, and for me it’s basically about a standardized consumerist view of the user: we expect corporations to satisfy us and make things easy for us, we accept the intellectual property laws (thanks, Bill) and we do not expect to understand how things really work and how we can change it. I enjoyed reading Spiegel’s text about this, because her experience and humble writing gives new light to the commercialisation of computer composing. I recommend you to read the whole text.

Sega Mega Drive Slack-Hack

Now this is a great idea for lazy chipnoise fanatics! By pulling out the game cartridge while some music is playing and quickly inserting another cartridge - you get new music! Made by the people at dramacore and sickmode. Download their album

Sega Death - 16 bits from hell (22mb)

“the album is weird but thats what happens.
nothing was sequenced and no fx were used.
just some cutting out of the silence and crap.”

- ian @ dramacore

“Classical” Chip Music

I remember a few years ago when I found a song performed by 7 C64:s. It was a cover by some “old classical composition” (in lack of better terminology). Unfortunately I didn’t really dig more deeply into this, until yesterday. It was programmed by Linus Åkesson in assembler to “get rid of the boring, quantized timing found in most computer-developed music” as he puts it himself. I had never really made a connection between “classical” music and chipmusic before and this was a fresh eye-opener. Browsing through his website, it turns out that Linus Åkesson is a very interesting data boy. For example:

1) He created his own chip. Together with his demoscene crew Akesson made the actual chip that plays the sounds and music: The Hardware Chiptune Project (2007). In a few days they made a microcontroller (8 Mhz CPU, 8kb ROM, 2kb RAM), programmed the sound generator and the tracker-software to finally make the music. The result is something far less minimalistic than Tristan Perich’s 1-bit music (2006).

2) Åkesson made a melody search engine for the C64 music collection HVSC: SID Theme Search Engine. The HVSC contains most C64-songs ever released, and the fileformat is essentially open source - containing all instruments and notation. That is why Åkesson could generate a database with the notes from each channel of almost every C64-song - a process which took several days eventhough using an emulator.

But to get back to the “classical” music in SID-style. There are several compositions: Allt Under Himmelens Fäste originally by the legendary demoscener Mahoney, Romance originally by Chopin but now in SID+piano version and, Fratres originally by Arvo Pärt. There are even more but my favourite remains the 7xSID-song Förklädd Gud. The thing that gets to me is that it’s rare to hear chipmusic so carefully crafted. The sounds are 8-bit but the assembler dynamics of 7 SID chips (although emulated) makes it sound more like Wendy Carlos than Rob Hubbard. This is an interesting song to keep in your pocket when people blame chip music for being simplistic. So check out Åkesson’s website - there are lots of interesting projects and lots of information and downloads aswell.

Destroying Chipmusic Myths

Chipmusic is music with sounds generated in realtime by a chip

As the term got popular in the early 1990’s demoscene, it referred more to sample based music rather than music made with synthetical sounds - the default sounds of the computer, so to say. Although sample based, the songs sounded very bleepy. It was because the samples used were only about the size of 100 bytes or so, and when loops are this small they don’t sound like a sound looping but rather a tone. This way of producing sounds is also used in synthesizers - for some examples check out the “natural waveforms” section here.

However, there has been music made on computers since the 1950’s. A lot of this music was played with sounds being generated in realtime by the computer. This was the technical pioneering of chipmusic. I tend to see the definition of chipmusic more in a social context though.

Chipmusic is made by hacking videogames

No. Or, a few times. But chipmusic is mostly made with (tracker) software copied from other users or downloaded off the internet. The composer usually doesn’t alter the software.

Composing chipmusic is very complex

Although the typical tracker interfaces of chipmusic software is not very intuitive and graphical, it is really not that diffucult to play around with after a few hours of learning the basic principles. Getting busy with a Commodore 64 using a tracker program might not suit a computer illiterate but I would say that most chipmusic composers are not programmers. It should also be mentioned that it can potentially be extremely complex by programming algorithmic and generative networks of interactive 8-bit machines. Or something.

Chipmusic is about remixing and DJing

Just like other electronic music, there is the possibility to perform live when you are actually just pressing the play button. Tracker software is often not very good for re-arranging songs, manipulating sounds or improvising in general. But there are ways of actually performing songs live and the Gameboy-program LSDJ is a good example of the possibilities of re-arranging and manipulating a song live. As for remixing - there is a point to be made about “the disease of the chipmusic scene to make covers” as Glomag expressed it at Blip Festival 2006. However, when we’re talking about non sample based chipmusic, every bit and byte is actually programmed by the composer. You could see this as the complete opposite of (a traditional view on) remixing.

Chipmusic doesn’t hide behind fancy sounds and production tricks

Saying that about a music style that is defined by its sound is sort of strange. The limited amount of channels and waveforms gives you a rather thin spectrum of technical possibilities. The sound of the song is defined by the technology, if the user doesn’t make an effort to do otherwise: the composer doesn’t have to care about the sound.

On the other hand, there are some people that prefer the 8-bit sound instead of other sound styles. They like a composition if it’s in the form of chipmusic, but not if it’s made with modern machines or a rockband. The point is - a chipmusic composer is defined by the sound, and therefore hides behind it. Just because the technology is cheaper than the ones in a studio doesn’t mean you can act all anti-commercial DIY-style and say that this is more pure and true than using a $666,666 computer. The real challenge, which is still very important for some people, is to really escape the limitations to make sounds that were not meant to be. But this is a standard saying for chipmusic composers and it might have lost some of its content by now.

Squarewave Space Action

This is the the second largest moon in the solar system in squarewaves. Is this chipmusic? Chip in Space? More info over at European Space Agency’s page.

mod.intro

We want to to start publishing more things about 8-bit creativity that is not about videogames and pop-music but rather about art, demoscene, noise, performance and man machine. This stems from the belief that the production, consumtion, socializing and distribution in the 8-bit communities has features that are unique to the 8-bit world.

Music is probably the 8-bit field that has gained most attention in popular culture. 2007 proved to be an interesting year with probably the world’s biggest chipmusic festival ever (Blipfestival in USA) and there was plenty of attention in the art world for a documentary about art, music and videogames (8 bit). The biggest stir was probably that of Timbaland’s extensive sampling of GRG and Tempest’s chiptune Acidjazzed Evening. In general though, the tendency of treating chipmusic as a musically simplistic, techically complex form of pop music has continued. Viewing chipmusic as a form and judging from popular places such as 8bitpeoples, modland or micromusic.net, this is the norm. However, from a technological perspective chipmusic does not have a form and there’s a wide range of alternative music that happens to be produced with lo-tech computers and consoles. The manifesto of Chip Music is Dead is one example, albeit more radical than most, of this perspective: “We reached the point that some of us had to be fearing of. VSTi and difussion started to become our enemies, cloning of ideals started mutation and blending.”

The point of this blog is not to argue for technological purism, but to focus on what makes the 8-bit machines and its communities unique. It can be the intimacy between man and machine, the open source music and sharing of knowledge and software, the demoscene dogmas of maximisation, the communities and the simple access to massive databases of 8-bit work. The future is bright!